I think I mentioned that it angered members of the Knesset that every week Uri Avnery raised and proposed bills that would change the Rules of Procedure in the Knesset. You could propose as many bills as you wanted, but you could not bring them for debate. Two bills a year or something like that. So I raised motions for the agenda endlessly. It annoyed them, so they set a quota: every faction could only have so many, and because I was a tiny faction I was allowed a tiny quota. Except for motions for proposals to the agenda, so I started to submit urgent proposals for the agenda. Things on the agenda which were urgent, until they restricted that, too. And so, slowly, they constrained me. But I learned about the ideas I wanted to bring into the Knesset, and things which I could not put on to the agenda and propose as bills, I would bring them up during a debate on any subject. There was a debate about the sunset? I would talk about the fire-fighters. And it's hard to avoid that in the Knesset. So in that way I talked about everything possible. Anything that interested me, and there were very few subjects that didn't interest me. They could have laughed at me if the speeches had not been serious. None of the hundreds of speeches I made were things I said without preparation, as other members of the Knesset often do. Members of the Knesset stand at the podium and speak on subjects about which they have no idea, and they talk and talk and talk. Apart from reading the Bible they did everything. I think that once someone also read the Bible. Lova Eliav once even read his own book. It was fairly ridiculous. I sat with Amnon Zichroni. Amnon Zichroni was a serious man. And sometimes I sat with the management of our movement. I recruited the members of the movement from various professions to help me prepare for the different issues. And I always spoke from a written script, and about serious matters. And they never caught me in the Knesset… for all of the 1000 or 650 speeches I made… they never caught me talking nonsense. No Minister ever went up to the podium and said: 'Ha Ha Ha – Uri Avnery doesn't know what he's talking about'. No such thing ever happened. They were always serious proposals and speeches, and I always dressed smartly. I decided from the beginning: if someone comes up with ideas that are exceptional, so unusual, he should be careful about other things, to be dressed very formally, very conservatively, not to use profanities, to always use proper parliamentary language. That was how I behaved from start to finish. So I think that there is no passage in any newspaper or book where anyone ever said that Uri Avnery was not serious in the Knesset. And I'm talking about things that every word I spoke, almost every word, has been exceptional and truly against everyone. I'm pretty proud of that, as you can hear, and I think I did a good job there and I enjoyed it, I must say.

Uri Avnery (1923-2018) was an Israeli writer, journalist and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement. As a teenager, he joined the Zionist paramilitary group, Irgun. Later, Avnery was elected to the Knesset from 1965 to 1974 and from 1979 to 1981. He was also the editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine, 'HaOlam HaZeh' from 1950 until it closed in 1993. He famously crossed the lines during the Siege of Beirut to meet Yasser Arafat on 3 July 1982, the first time the Palestinian leader ever met with an Israeli. Avnery was the author of several books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including '1948: A Soldier's Tale, the Bloody Road to Jerusalem' (2008); 'Israel's Vicious Circle' (2008); and 'My Friend, the Enemy' (1986).

Anat Saragusti is a film-maker, book editor and a freelance journalist and writer. She was a senior staff member at the weekly news magazine Ha'olam Hazeh, where she was prominent in covering major events in Israel. Uri Avnery was the publisher and chief editor of the Magazine, and Saragusti worked closely with him for over a decade. With the closing of Ha'olam Hazeh in 1993, Anat Saragusti joined the group that established TV Channel 2 News Company and was appointed as its reporter in Gaza. She later became the chief editor of the evening news bulletin. Concurrently, she studied law and gained a Master's degree from Tel Aviv University.